Thursday, February 21, 2013

Animal rights activists in Oakland County work to prevent hunting of wolves

Published: Tuesday, February 19, 2013

By JOHN TURKOf The Oakland Press

This photo of a wolf, courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was shot by Scott Flaherty.

Recent efforts in Oakland County and
throughout Michigan are aiming at overturning a state legislative
decision designating wolves as game animals.

This, on the heels
of a recent lawsuit filed to get gray wolves back on a federal
endangered species list, appears to be only one of the issues
surrounding the animal that was deemed endangered a little more than a
year ago.

At any event throughout the county, residents can
expect to see petitioners outside with their clipboards, asking for
signatures to protect Michigan’s wolves.

After wolves were
designated — in a December lame duck session in Lansing — as a game
animal in Michigan, almost 300 animal rights activists in Oakland County
have signed up to collect signatures in an effort to overturn the
legislation.

Since 2003, wolves have been delisted as an endangered species and relisted four times.

Oakland
County volunteer coordinator Pam Sordyl said her decision to volunteer
came from her feeling that Michigan was going in the wrong direction.

“We’re losing animals to extinction, and the last we need to be doing is hunting them,” said Sordyl, a Clarkston resident.

She
coordinates volunteers to go to events, libraries, township meetings,
farmer’s markets — “anywhere there’s a line of people,” she said.

“Most
people hear, ‘Want to help protect wolves?’ and they’re very
enthusiastic. Many sign up right away,” said Sordyl. “Being a close
relative to the dog family — and dogs are well-loved throughout the
county — must be why people identify with this type of animal.”

Recent wolf news

More
than a year ago, wolves were taken off of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service’s endangered species lists. Fritz said this is just the next
step in allowing them to be trophy hunted.

She referenced two other Great Lakes states, Wisconsin and Minnesota, who went through similar steps in the past seven years.

Within
months of wolves being taken off those states’ endangered species
lists, legislators went to work introducing a hunting season.

“More
than 500 wolves have been killed by hunters and trappers in Minnesota
and Wisconsin since October 2012, when the wolf hunting and trapping
season began,” said Fritz. “There’s certainly been a lot of excitement
for pelts or hunting for trophy.”

In any case, she said, after
seeing the rush to begin killing wolves in other states, it’s painfully
clear that federal protection for wolves is needed for wolves in
Michigan.

Keep Michigan Wolves Protected is attempting to gain
enough signatures — 225,000 to be exact — to place a referendum on the
2014 general election ballot to allow voters to choose whether to enact
the legislature’s wolf hunting law.

Although she doesn’t know the
exact number of signatures have been collected for Keep Michigan Wolves
Protected, Fritz is confident her organization will garner enough for a
ballot inclusion.

Ed Golder, DNR spokesman, said he thinks a ballot referendum is a bad way to manage complex natural resource issues.

“Hunting
hasn’t even been established yet,” said Golder. “The Natural Resources
Commission is just now in the process of determining if a hunting season
should take place.”

With hunting season on wolves on
the horizon, Michigan Natural Resources Commission member John Madigan
thinks a lot gets lost in translation for the general public.

“In order to have a hunt, we have to make sure the (wolf) population isn’t going to be placed at risk,” Madigan said.

He said experts will be coming in from Wisconsin

“If
there is a hunting season, it will be to manage population ... just
like we manage other species, like bear, elk, deer ... the process will
be no different.”

The process in Michigan comes during a time when issues surrounding wolves are at a high point.

In the west, several legislators have recently introduced legislation on wolf population management.

On
Feb. 12, a group of wildlife protection agencies — The Humane Society,
Born Free USA, Help out Wolves Live and Friends of Animals and Their
Environment — filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
in Washington, D.C., in an attempt to place Great Lakes area gray
wolves back on the endangered species list and give them federal
protection under the Endangered Species Act.

While the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service can’t comment on the pending litigation public
affairs specialist Georgia Parham said the decision to take federal
protection away from wolves went forward because “gray wolves are
thriving in the western Great Lakes region.”

In 2011, when wolves
were delisted, the population totaled more than 4,400 animals in the
core recovery states – Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

“The
region's gray wolf population and distribution have exceeded recovery
goals since at least 2001 and far exceed minimum population goals in
each of the three states,” said Parham, reading from a recent statement.

The problem with the numbers is
that they most likely won’t stay that way, said Born Free USA’s Monica
Engebretson, a senior program associate.

She cited the methods
that some are using to hunt wolves, like baiting, steel trapping, neck
snares, night hunting and poisoning.

“The states are reinstating
the very strategies that put wolves at risk in the first place,” said
Engebretson. “We’re going to be right back where we started.”

While this litigation remains federal, Michigan DNR’s Golder said there’s a possibility that the state may get involved.

Oakland County reacts

Following
unconfirmed tips to The Oakland Press that residents were seeing wolves
in Oakland Township, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources
released that they would be conducting a wolf track survey in the Lower
Peninsula and asked for the public’s help in reporting any sightings.

“Given
the low probability of observing an actual wolf or its tracks in the
Lower Peninsula, it’s helpful to have as many eyes looking as possible,”
said DNR wildlife biologist Jennifer Kleitch. “That's why public
reports are so important.”

So are there wolves in Oakland County?

“There have been no sightings, to my knowledge, of any wolves,” said Oakland County Animal Control Manager Bob Gatt.

Gatt
said that many people mistake coyotes for wolves because of the similar
features. However, the DNR’s information on wolves compared to coyotes
shows that wolves are nearly twice as large.

Golder confirms that
the wolf population remains in the Upper Peninsula and — as of now — he
doesn’t have any indication that there’s any population at all in the
Lower Peninsula, much less in Oakland County.

The reports of
wolves may simply be from people who may have never seen one, said Mark
Evans, a Waterford Township coyote trapper.

Evans, who runs
Critters Be Gone in Waterford, said he’s gotten many reports from
residents saying they saw a wolf in their backyard. In all cases, it has
been a coyote — the population of which has been rising since he
started trapping four years ago.

Facebook users, on The Oakland
Press’ profile page, weighed in Tuesday, giving their thoughts on the
legislation, and litigation, surrounding wolves.

Reader Norma Palen said, simply: “Keep wolves as endangered species.”

Jason Henwood, who firmly disagreed, said wolves aren’t an endangered species at all.

“Just cause [sic] they once were doesn't mean they need protection ... waste of time and resources,” he said.

Christine
Paige said that just because an animal comes back from the brink of
being endangered does not mean people should go “open season” on them.

“Canada Geese are overpopulated, and cause more problems, but you don't see anyone advocating hunting geese,” said Paige.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone